


Imagine a morning in late December

by Deisderium



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Holiday Fic Exchange, Holidays, Hot Chocolate, Husbands, M/M, Reading Aloud, Snow, Sweaters, so very much fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 04:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17135126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deisderium/pseuds/Deisderium
Summary: Steve and Bucky have a book reading tradition centered around the first snow of December. Bucky really wants it to snow, but the weather's not cooperating.





	Imagine a morning in late December

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crinklefries](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinklefries/gifts).



> This story is for the wonderful crinklefries for the Stevebucky Holiday Gift Exchange! Crinklefries asked for soft husbands with sweaters and snow, and I hope I delivered. Happy holidays, everyone!

Bucky wouldn't say he was _actually_ watching the sky, but he couldn't help pasting his face to the window every few minutes

"Steve," he said, in a tone of voice that was in no way petulant. "When's it gonna snow?" 

"Google says today." Steve didn’t look up from his book. 

"Wait a minute." Bucky narrowed his eyes at a sudden suspicion. "What are you reading?" 

"This? Just a history." Steve still didn't look away from the page, just heaved his shoulders in a highly dubious manner. Bucky turned away from the window and crossed to the couch, walking with deliberate aggressiveness. Steve pretended to ignore it, but Bucky saw the smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. 

Steve Rogers had never in his life read _just some history_. If he was reading about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Bucky was going to hear about unionizing. If he was reading about the Vietnam war, Bucky was going to hear about war crimes. If he was reading about Stonewall, they were going to ugly cry their way through to legal gay marriage. Again. 

"What are you reading, Rogers?" Bucky tipped the book up. _A Christmas Memory_ , by Truman Capote.  "Jesus fuck, Steve, I knew it, you cheating asshole. It's not snowing yet!"

Steve shrugged again, unrepentant. Bucky sent him his best Winter Soldier glare, blank-eyed and full of violence. Steve lifted one eyebrow. Bucky guessed that the last two decades of being together had worn the threat off of it.

"It's not cheating," Steve said, placing the book, open-faced, on his broad chest. "I won't  read it _out loud_ before it actually snows."

"That's a fucking cheat, Steve." Bucky pushed forward into Steve's personal space. "This is letter-of-the-law bullshit." 

Steve leaned up, meeting Bucky halfway, one large hand pinning the book to his torso. Steve's hands had always seemed outsized for his body, his long fingers reaching impossibly wide. He reached up with his free hand and tangled it in Bucky's hair, tugging him closer. "What are you going to do about it?" 

Bucky slid his hands over Steve's sides. He was wearing a blue sweater that Bucky had given him a few years back. Bucky had bought it for the cables crisscrossing Steve's chest, but it was Steve's favorite because it was soft. Bucky stroked gently up the arch of Steve's ribcage, the swell of his pectoral muscles. Steve sucked in a breath as Bucky's thumbs tracked over his nipples...and snatched the book out from under his hand. 

"I'm gonna cheat you back, you jerk." Bucky jumped away, the book held out of reach. 

"You're disrespecting our snow tradition." Steve tried to twist his laughing face into an expression of indignation.

"You started it." Bucky mock-glared at him. The first snow of December was when they read _A Christmas Memory_ , as it had been for about ten years now, since Steve first found the story in a collection at the library. It had been written in the fifties, when Steve was in the ice and Bucky had been doing things best not thought about, but it was the author's memories of the thirties, making fruitcake with his elderly and slightly batty cousin. It was set somewhere rural, not in Brooklyn, but the characters scraping together pennies to make their Christmas cakes was certainly familiar from their youth, and the sweet warmth of the story, tinged with a little melancholy and a lot of nostalgia, made it a favorite for both of them. 

The first year, after Steve had read the story, he'd put it in Bucky's hands and said, "Read this." And Bucky did; silently at first, but then as he found a phrase or sentence that he liked, he read that out loud. Then he found another, and another, and by the end, he was just reading the whole thing out loud, Steve next to him on the couch. By the end, neither of them had dry eyes, and when they looked up, it was snowing after a week of rain and sludge. 

The next year, Bucky had gotten the book from the library on the first of December and handed it to Steve to read since the ground was already white with snow. The year after that, Steve had given him a beautiful hardcover copy as an early Christmas gift at the first snowflake--the very copy that the cheating cheater had been duplicitously reading. 

Steve caught him; Bucky wasn't really trying that hard to get away.  "We could start early," Steve said. 

Bucky poked him with a metal finger and set the book down on the coffee table. "Let's take a walk instead." 

Steve wrapped his arms around him, warm and enveloping. "Sure thing, pal." 

It was cold and overcast, and it smelled like snow even though none had made an appearance yet. Steve had put on his leather jacket and a pair of gloves as his only concession to the temperature, while Bucky had on a peacoat, gloves, a scarf, and a hat over his own sweater. He'd had enough cold in his life. They linked arms and walked with no particular destination, ending up at a park, watching a mother riding herd on two small children chasing each other, small and blobular in puffy jackets and knitted hats. 

"Is that--" Steve whipped his head up and stared intently at the sky. "No, false alarm." 

"Asshole," Bucky muttered, but in a loving way. 

They walked on, stopping for hot chocolate, until the tip of Bucky's nose was cold and he was ready to call it quits. "Let's head home," he said. "I think Google lied to us about the weather."

"We can pick up dinner on the way," Steve said.

When they got home, Bucky waited until Steve was in the bathroom and hid the book in his sock drawer. It was the only way to be sure. 

After dinner, he stepped outside one last time, trying to will precipitation into existence, but eventually he had to concede defeat. Tomorrow would have to be another day. 

* * *

The next day brought a brief hailstorm that left a scattering of slippery pellets which slowly devolved into slush. Bucky and Steve were meeting Natasha for lunch. It had been a while since they'd seen her; unlike the two of them, she still took missions, and she'd had a long stint undercover doing something that she couldn't tell them about. She looked good; like them, she was showing only the faintest signs of age. Whatever the Red Room had done to her, it had similar effects to the serum. Bucky had just gotten his first couple of grays in the last few years. Steve still claimed not to have any, but he could only say that because his hair was lighter. Bucky was always close enough to see the few threads of silver in among the gold. 

"Achromatic," Steve had said. "Those aren't grays, they're just colorless." 

Bucky had rolled his eyes, but privately he cherished each proof of time's mark on them: every gray, every crow's foot, the lines on Steve's forehead that were slowly becoming permanent. He'd never thought when they were kids that Steve would get to be old at all; his heart wouldn't have gotten him much past thirty, if that, and that was before considering all his other health problems. And then there had been the war, and he hadn't really ever thought that he was coming home from that. He'd been right; neither of them had made it home from the war the way they should have. 

But they were home now, with each other, in a time and place where they could walk through Brooklyn hand in hand and not catch a second glance. Maybe that's why he was so eager for their tradition, because they'd had the time with each other to make it theirs, as much as Steve roasting leg of lamb on Christmas Eve, or the oranges they put in each others' stockings. If only the fucking sky would cooperate. It wasn't exactly that he was dying to read the story; he knew how it went. But it was the thing he and Steve did that meant it was almost Christmas, and he was ready for it.

Nat had beaten them there and was already scanning the menu. She stood as they walked up and allowed them both to hug her. She didn't look tired, but Bucky thought she might be, the kind of tired that came at the end of a mission, especially a long one, brittle with being someone else and trying to fit back into her regular life. When you were on for so long, sometimes getting back to off was more tiring than the performance itself. 

"It's good to see you," he told her as he let her go. 

"You too." She looked from him to Steve, allowing herself a quarter smile. "How've you been?" 

Bucky told her about the animal shelter he was volunteering at and the shepherd-lab mix he was trying not to adopt. Steve told her about the remodeling they were doing to the art studio. They got champagne and toasted each other over soup and sandwiches, and when their meal was nothing but crumbs, they ordered mulled cider and talked a little longer. Natasha couldn't tell them what she'd been up to, but he thought he could see her unwind a little, just from being in the company of friends. 

"Huh," Natasha said when they were leaving the restaurant, tucking her scarf around her neck. "I think it's starting to snow." 

Bucky looked up at the gray clouds over them and tracked a single snowflake. He held out his gloved left hand and caught it, watching as it didn't melt against the black leather. He glanced over to Steve, about to say something smartass, but caught Steve watching him, his eyes soft, his mouth curving up into a happy grin. 

"Yeah, yeah," Bucky said instead. His own face was probably doing the same thing. "Nat, you want to come read a story with us?" 

She tilted her head and looked from one to the other of them, then shrugged. "Sure. Why not?" 

The snow started falling more heavily as they walked, and by the time they were back at their brownstone, it had begun to cling to the streets and sidewalks, slowly layering the gray with white. Steve's feet left gray prints on their steps as he unlocked the door. The air smelled crisp and bright, and there were snowflakes on the shoulders of Nat's black jacket. 

After they hung their coats and unwound their scarves and left their boots by the door, Bucky went to make hot chocolate while Steve got Nat settled. 

"Hey," Steve called from the other room as Bucky stirred the pan, "where's the book? It's not on the shelf." 

He had to think about it for a second. "In my sock drawer." 

This brought Steve into the kitchen, his head popping around the corner. "All right, Buck, but...why?" 

"Some jerk kept trying to read it early," Bucky said serenely.

Steve snorted a laugh and a minute later, Bucky heard him clomping up the stairs. Natasha slunk over to the counter and watched intently as Bucky grated nutmeg then added a little red pepper to the pan. 

"Did you just put a vegetable in my hot chocolate?" Natasha fixed him with a gimlet eye. 

"A vegetable that has been dried and ground to powder, yes. And when you taste it, you'll thank me." He dipped a tasting spoon into the pan, judged himself satisfied, and poured the chocolate out into three mugs. He gave one to Natasha and watched, one eyebrow raised, as she took a sip.

"Acceptable," she said with a brisk nod, but the corner of her mouth was turning up. He scooped up his and Steve's mugs and they walked into the living room as Steve's footsteps jumbled down the staircase again. 

He brandished the book at Bucky, a grin warring with his attempt at a severe expression. "Found it." 

"Yeah, because I told you where it was." Bucky passed him his hot chocolate. 

"The sock drawer is real super spy shit, Buck. I'd never have found it there." Steve sank down on his end of the couch, and Bucky took the other, swinging his legs up so he could bury his toes under Steve's thigh.

Natasha took the overstuffed chair catty corner to Bucky, and took another sip of her chocolate. "You're right," she said. "It's good spicy." 

Bucky allowed himself a smug smile, then dug his toes into Steve's leg. 

Steve shot him a dirty look, then cracked open the book and started to read.

"Imagine a morning in late November," Steve began. "A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature..." 

Natasha started out sprawling on her chair, but before too long she was leaning forward, elbows on her knees, watching Steve between sips. Steve was a good reader, his deep voice a pleasure to listen to--though maybe that was just Bucky--and his familiarity with the story giving him a knack for placing intonation and emphasizing the right words. 

Not quite forty minutes later, Steve shut the book, and Bucky leaned back. The dregs of chocolate in his mug had long gone cold, but he was warm all over with both the bittersweetness of the story and the satisfaction that the thing he'd been looking forward to had happened, and it was as good as it always was, regardless of which of them read it that year. 

"That was really lovely," Natasha said. 

Steve ducked his chin. "Thanks. We do it every year, the first snow of December." 

Nat's face went still for a second, and then she smiled, wide and real. "Thanks for letting me listen in, then." 

And that was another source of satisfaction, he realized; that the circle the two of them made was solid and strong enough to let someone else in when she needed it. When he had first come in, he'd been too uncertain of himself to trust in what he and Steve had, but now, he knew what they were; he trusted. He levered himself off the couch and walked behind Steve, leaning forward to loop his arms around his chest and drop a kiss on his head. 

"Let's go see how much it snowed," he said. 

None of them bothered with their coats, just put on their boots and walked out into the street. The snow was still falling; it had piled up on their front steps, pristine and rounded, the footprints of an hour ago vanished. The street was transformed, covered in white, and though he saw it every year, each time was a snapshot of a different moment in time; a moment where the snow and cold were a beautiful scene, where he could appreciate them, and then go into the warm home the two of them had made. He caught Steve's eye, his breath pluming in the air between them, let himself look at the familiar arch of his lips as he smiled, the beloved crook of his nose.

"Come on," he said. "Let's go inside." 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The principal of my high school used to read _A Christmas Memory_ at a school event every year. While it's set in a different part of the country, I think a lot of it would hold resonances for Steve and Bucky.


End file.
